Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Editions Gallimard
Date Published: 2002
ISBN-13:9782070368051ISBN:207036805X
Description: Good. Good. Good, book is solid, underlining and marginalia thru-out, but done discretely. INTERNATIONAL CUSTOMERS PLEASE CALCULATE APPROPRIATE SHIPPING COSTS BEFORE PURCHASE good, book is solid, underlining and marginalia thru-out, but done discretely. read more
Description: Like New. SHIPS FROM GERMANY. NO EXPEDITED SHIPPING! Allow 10-14 business days for delivery. Please always check the language in the product description section. Few left in stock-order soon. Selling online since 1995. Code: L20091124015348I. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: EDITIONS FLAMMARION
Date Published: 1995
ISBN-13:9782070368051ISBN:207036805X
Description: Published by Editions Flammarion in 1995. Paperback. Number of pages: 249. Condition: Very Good. May show some slight signs of wear. #8442569 Shipped from UK. Delivery is usually 2-3 working days from order by Royal Mail, International Delivery is by Airmail. read more
"The title says it all: Existence is nauseating if you insist it is pointless. I dislike Sartre. He had it all backwards ("existence precedes essence") though I didn't know it to that extent at the time. I just knew he was another self-absorbed hypocrite. Wikipedia: "As a fellow-traveller, Sartre spent much of the rest of his life attempting to reconcile his existentialist ideas about free will with communist principles, which taught that socio-economic forces beyond our immediate, individual control play a critical role in shaping our lives." If he had lived his philosophy, he wouldn't have cared about socialism. or anything else. Flannery O'Connor pegged it in A Good Man is Hard to Find when the Misfit says "There's no pleasure but meanness." If what Sartre said is true, this is the only logical response."
"I decided it was time to reread one of my favorite books. I love this book like I love The Descendents and Husker Du. It's both brilliant and somehow embarassing. A must-read for angsty teenage boys, I now read Sartre's first novel as great both for its dramatization of existentialist philosophy and for its naively masculine, self-centered, and overly ambitious attempt to describe the experience of existence as it really is. Somehow, this seems like a thought that you can only ponder while smoking cigarettes in a French cafe.
Still, deep down I think there's some truth to the claim that existentialism touches something of an intuitive human experience. Sartre's main character interrogates the concept that everything that we hold to be human is fleeting, and has only a tenuous hold on the material existence of the world. Roquentin comes to see the world as an assmeblage of material existences that act on him in ways that violate his notions of humanity, challenging him to ponder existence without history, and without priveledging human consciousness. The dissolution of all human values causes the nausea after which the book is named. Still one of the most concise and compelling challenges to humanism.
Put some Minor Threat, and 16 year old me will tell you all about how great this book is."
""Where shall I keep mine? You don't put your past in your pocket; you have to have a house. I have only my body: a man entirely alone, with his lonely body, cannot indulge in memories; they pass through him. I shouldn't complain: all I wanted was to be free" (65). "...on my right, the headlights of cars chased a misty light before them" (70). "He went to get a plate of rolls from the table the people had just left. 'Don't bother.' "I didn't feel inclined to eat those rolls" (72). "I tried to absorb myself in reading, to find a refuge in the lucid Italy of Stendahl. Sometimes I succeeded, in spurts, in short hallucinations, then fell back again into this day of menace" (80). "I hadn't the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe" (84). "I jump up: it would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things" (99). "I exist, that's all. And the trouble is so vague, so metaphysical that I am ashamed of it" (105). *** "Once they have slept together they will have to find something else to veil the enourmous absurdity of their existence" (111). *** "We were a heap of living creatures, irritated, embarrassed at ourselves, we hadn't the slightest reason to be there, none of us, eah one, confused, vaguely alarmed, felt in the way in relation to the others. In the way: it was the only relationship I could establish between these tress, these gates, these stones" (128). "'I know that I shall never again meet anythihng or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it. I know I'll never jump again'" (145). "Then, perhaps, because of it, I could remember my life without repugnance" (178)."
"what a letdown after Camus and Hesse. I did like the book, well some parts of it- around 70 pages, but it lacks when it comes to writing style. it's nothing like Kafka, Camus or Hesse, it's existentialistic alright, it has bits of philosophy that I found every interesting but the rest is just mumbles of a little boy who doesn't know what to do with his life and thinks of himself as interesting. the main character never feels anything except "nausea"; I don't mind the fact that it doesn't have an actual plot- I loved Hamsun's "Hunger", but at least there the character was alive and felt things (at a dazzling pace, yes, and he was innocently stupid, yes, but at least it was something of a catchy interesting read). the book just feels infantile, in a way, it's like "The Catcher in the Rye" + existentialism."
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